A recent  interview with Clay Shirky in the Columbia Journalism Review provides some new insights into my previous posts on Information Load (here and here.) The transcript is in two parts. Part I addresses the question of information overload from the perspective of what’s different today than in the past, and whether we are or are not better off in terms of the quality of content, our ability to manage it, and the generational differences.

Although the interviewer, Russ Juskalian, approaches the question from the viewpoint of journalism itself the conversation resonated with content questions that enterprises adopting social media should be asking:

• At what point do we stop being nostalgic for our relationship with the media we’ve grown up using and accept that social tools are extending our ability to interact with information? And to extend and create information in new ways?
•  The first instance of information overload (defined, perhaps, as more information is available than can be consumed by an individual) occurred when the Library of Alexandria was created. It has only escalated since then, and we have somehow “controlled” our feeling of overload by adopting cataloguing and classification systems. These were, essentially, our first information filters.
• In an era in which everyone with Internet access is free to “commit an act of journalism” (I love that phrase), our previous filters and the ways that we have constructed them fail to help us sort through through all the stuff that comes our way so that we can “keep the conversation I’m having … [be] the most interesting it can be.
• These conversations are becoming so much more interesting becaue the Internet has “weakened the walls of our institutions.” Although Shirky’s context here is the university, where co-authored, multidisciplinary work is on the rise, we need to think as well about how the Internet creeps into our enterprises and how it impacts how we think about work, and think about the definition of “colleague.”
• The way out of information overload is to adopt social filters (“The only group that can catalog everything is everybody”) so we can know what our colleagues and potentially their extended ties are learning, thinking, walking around with, and making sense of. Those who remain nostalgic for the past need to unlearn the strategies that made them successful, to think and act anew (Abraham Lincoln via recent posts from Dave Snowden) and that means learning to use these new tools.

The second part of the interview veers into a discussion of the future of journalism in an environment in which [print] journalists need to understand the business model of the for-profit print media. The print media, he claims, will be the stronghold of long-form journalism as the Internet stakes out the short-form. The re-thinking of the Christian Science Monitor illustrates the new business model: daily updates on the Web, a weekly print version that addresses topics in depth. (Hat tip to Stewart Mader for reminding me to look at this more closely.)

It all comes down, I think, to how we manage our short- and even (burst-) forms of information and balance them with the long-form, reflective work — deep thinking — that is vital to learning. I’ll admit that a couple of months immersion in the burst-form media (Twitter, Facebook, and now even blip.fm) have helped me unlearn, too much, the ability to reflect and write carefully. I am deeply grateful to Cory Doctorow for posting the remedy, “Writing in the Age of Distraction.” Knowledge workers, take your lesson here.